Telling the Bees (4 page)

Four

D
WINDLING:
The dying off of old bees in the spring, sometimes called spring dwindling or the disappearing disease.

T
hough I found myself surprisingly agitated at the thought of abandoning my former friends, I reluctantly allowed myself at this time to be ushered onto the Straussmans’ front porch where Detective Grayson solicited additional information from me about the nature of my relationship with the Straussman sisters. I told him that I’d known them all my life, that my parents had moved to this area from Oregon more than seventy years before, and that we—the Straussman sisters, my sister and myself—had all grown up together.

I do not recall the exact progression of our discourse, but I believe it moved at some point from the friendship Claire and I once shared to Aristotle’s observations on the general nature of bees and how he was able, through this particular manner of philosophic extrapolation, to glean some further insight into the nature of man.

I, of course, hold no such lofty philosophic conceits. But I did tell the detective that through years of careful observation I have been able to discern quite clearly when my bees are hungry or when they are cold. Through a nuanced pattern of motion and sound, my bees signal just as plainly to me when there’s an abundance of honey to be harvested from the hive or when they are set to swarm. Indeed, my bees tell me when a new queen has been born, and though I’ve gotten more than a few painful stings over the years, I’ve learned to judge by the tone and pitch of their buzz whether they’re glad to see me or if they are on the other hand offended by the smell of a new pair of woolen gloves I am wearing or off-put by the color of my jacket.

“I remember in particular the fuss I stirred up among my hives the time I wore a purple velvet jacket.”

I explained to Detective Grayson that I would never have chosen this color or fabric on my own, but one of my honey customers, a young woman with something of an ethereal nature, had presented me with this particular jacket as a thank-you present for helping her to start a bee colony of her own.

“You look like someone who could have worn this in a past life,” she’d said. Beaming like a courtesan, she’d reached up to help me into the jacket, and, not wanting to hurt her feelings, I had thanked her heartily and waved good-bye, with her watching all the way as I headed out to my number one hive. This is how I discovered that my bees did not like purple, I told the good detective. “Before I could take the offending jacket off, I received three, perhaps four, bee stings.”

“What’s your point, Mr. Honig?” Detective Grayson said, flipping his notebook closed and slipping it and his pen back into his jacket pocket.

My point was that bees are extraordinary creatures.

“Did you know that the ancient Egyptians revered honeybees, believing that they were born from the tears of the sun god, Ra?”

“I can’t say that I did,” Detective Grayson replied, glancing back toward the front door where the attendants stood poised to wheel out the first of the two steel gurneys bearing the Straussman sisters’ remains.

Before I had the chance to elaborate on the mythic significance of bees to Egyptian civilization, the detective thanked me rather perfunctorily for what assistance I had been able to provide and called one of his junior officers over to show me to my home just as the Straussmans’ front door swung open and the shorter of the two coroner assistants nosed the first gurney out onto the Straussmans’ front porch. I assumed it was Claire who was zipped into the black body bag as the straps on the gurney were notched tight with plenty to spare.

Before taking my leave, I asked the detective if I might ask a favor of him. He raised his eyebrows, which, like his hair, were in need of a good trim.

“Would it be possible for you to see to it that they are transported in a single vehicle?” I queried, gesturing to the pair of coroner’s vans parked in the driveway. I explained to the detective that in all their years on earth, Hilda and Claire had only rarely found cause to spend time apart.

Detective Grayson took a deep breath and squeezed the raised tendons at the back of his neck.

“As the Lord has seen fit to take them from this life together,” I persisted, “it seems so very wrong to send them off to their heavenly repose in separate vehicles.”

The detective’s eyes flicked from me to the second gurney that had just begun to nose out the door and back to me again. He shook his big bear head slowly and let out a protracted sigh.

“I’ll see what I can do.”

I had no choice but to trust his good intentions, and so I let myself be led back across the expanse of the Straussmans’ front yard to my own porch, where I bid the young officer a polite farewell at my doorstep. I considered for a moment whether I should check on my hives before going inside. Though the sun was still less than midway through its journey across the sky, darkness had already fallen on all I could see, and, in truth, my legs suddenly felt as though weighted with lead. There was a growing constriction in my chest that seemed to ratchet ever tighter with each breath I took. I decided my bees would have to take care of themselves for an afternoon.

Entering my darkened house, I sat for a while in my parlor before slowly climbing the stairs to my bedroom, which by then was bathed in late-afternoon shadows. I switched on the reading light over my mother’s old padded rocker. I had moved this chair from my parents’ room into mine after my father’s death.

Sleep was out of the question, but, for once, I found no solace in my books. After a time, I switched off the lamp, opened the curtains of my window, and lay down on my bed. I watched the color of the sky shift from gray to mottled black to gray again.

Five

Q
UEEN MANDIBULAR PROTEIN:
A pheromone produced by the queen bee that attracts drones for mating, inhibits the production of replacement queens, unites the colony, and stabilizes its temperament by drawing attendants to the queen and stimulating the development of nurse and forager bees to raise its brood and gather honey and pollen to feed it. Without it, robber bees seem to be drawn to the hive.

T
he next morning, I arose even earlier than was my custom. Finding food as unappealing as sleep, I decided to forgo my usual breakfast routine in favor of a small nibble of dry toast and a teaspoon of jasmine honey. Yet even this slight fare seemed to catch in my throat, and I quickly sought what comfort I could out of doors in the quietude of my own thoughts, where I passed most of the morning tending to my hives, which had been sorely neglected in the distractions of the previous day.

It was close to noon, and I was doing what I could to fend off a small brown ant infestation in my number three hive when I heard my name being shouted from across my backyard. I looked up to see the detective I had met at the Straussman sisters’ home the previous day standing at the foot of my back porch.

“Mr. Honig?” he called again to me, this time louder, but with a slight tremor that I naturally ascribed to an apprehension common to those finding themselves in close proximity to so large a number of bees for the first time. I set down my smoker can and the empty container of motor oil I had just finished pouring into the tin pans suspended on the legs of my hive stand. I approached the house, as it was clear by the grip of the detective’s hand on the porch railing that he would venture no closer of his own accord. As my mother often said, it is easier to bring Muhammad to the mountain than the mountain to Muhammad.

“Please, call me Albert,” I said, extending my hand. I had hoped to put him at ease by dispensing of such formalities as surnames, though, in truth, it was not solely his comfort I sought. For most of my days it had been my father to whom friends and neighbors had referred to as Mr. Honig, while I was known simply as “young Albert.” Even though I myself was in my eighth decade, I confess that I was at that moment still loath to accept my natural inheritance.

“Albert?” Detective Grayson said. “Not the Bee Man?”

“No,” I said, “just Albert.”

“So how come?” the detective prodded, nodding toward the clutch of hives sprinkled throughout my backyard and on into the small orange grove that extended beyond it.

“I beg your pardon?”

“I’m just wondering why you have two little old ladies with a few hives in their backyard and everybody calls them the Bee Ladies, but here you are, right next door, and from what I can see you’ve got triple, maybe four times as many, hives and you’re just plain old Albert. How come?”

“I don’t know,” I replied. I’d never thought to ask myself this question before. How does one acquire a nickname? Having never been called by anything but my given name, I could only speculate.

“Perhaps because no one knew what else to call them?” I ventured. “They rather liked to keep to themselves.”

“Fair enough,” the detective said. “So how come you know what to call them?”

“As I said yesterday, we grew up together. We were friends once.”

I paused for a moment with my hand on the porch railing as the detective’s eyes scanned the sky above him for imagined hordes of murderous bees. I noticed that the veins in my hand seemed quite blue and pronounced beneath my sun-roughened skin. I was struck by how much my hands reminded me of my father’s, especially late in life. His fingers had been long and tapered like my own. Musician’s hands, my mother used to say, though neither of us could play more than a clumsy note or two on any instrument to speak of. Hopelessly tone-deaf, my mother used to call us.

“Would you care to join me inside for a cool glass of lemonade?” I asked, certain the detective would take me up on my offer of refuge, if not refreshment.

“Don’t go to any trouble,” Detective Grayson said with a final nervous glance at the nearest stand of hives as he strode past me onto the porch stairs. He made it clear with only the slightest nod of his head that he was used to taking the lead in any given situation and that it was only out of courtesy that he paused at the screen door to allow me to enter first. This I acknowledged with a nod of my own as I passed.

Like the Straussmans’ house, my back door opens into a small service porch leading into the kitchen. A stack of unopened mail lay next to the morning paper on my dinette table, and I was most regretfully aware of Detective Grayson’s observational eye lingering over the dirty dishes I had left on the counter.

“Forgive the mess,” I said, quickly rinsing the dishes and stacking them in the sink as I spoke. “I hurried through my breakfast to get an early start on my daily chores, whereupon I found a band of marauding ants preparing an assault on my number three hive.”

The detective turned his attention from the clutter in my sink to me.

“Which means what?” he said. I noticed that in the early-afternoon light his hazel eyes were streaked with silver.

“One of the greatest problems facing beekeepers here in this region are brown ants. They overrun our hives from time to time, yet the poison many beekeepers use to prevent such invasions presents an even greater hazard to the very hives we seek to protect.

“It would be a grave mistake to rid the premises of ants entirely because during the greater part of the year, these tiny insects perform a useful service keeping our yards and apiary clean. This is especially true during peak honeyflow season, when the hardworking field bees labor so strenuously that they live only a short four to six weeks. If they chance to die in the hive, some hive bees take it upon themselves to carry the deceased worker out into the yard where they drop her to the ground. As soon as she is abandoned, the ants rush in, seemingly from nowhere, to strip the carcass of all edible flesh. This natural arrangement works well, unless a nest of ants grows so greedy as to overstep its bounds and attempt to avail itself of the honey cached within the hives. This is when the prudent beekeeper must intervene.”

Detective Grayson, who had meanwhile taken a seat at the kitchen table, began to sweep a clutter of errant toast crumbs into a tiny pile and then off the tabletop into his cupped palm.

“My father first hit upon the idea of making moats out of pie tins to repel the invading forces,” I told the detective as I held out my hand. He brushed the crumbs into it, and I rinsed them off into the sink.

“You were saying?” he said.

“The moats are made by sawing off all four hive stands’ legs midway up their length and nailing pie tins to the top of the separated leg segments and then reattaching each one to its mated stub with the pie tin between.

“The tins are filled with motor oil. Oil is more difficult for ants to cross than plain water, and if one is careful to keep the pans filled to capacity at all times, and free of leaves and twigs, which ants are clever enough to use as natural bridges, such an arrangement is usually successful in keeping both populations separated.”

I explained all this as I collected two clean glasses from the kitchen cabinet and a pitcher of lemonade from my icebox.

“Let’s go into the other room, shall we?”

Detective Grayson nodded and stood, wiping his palms on his pant legs, and I led him into the dining room, where he eased his heavy frame into a seat at the polished mahogany table facing the front window.

“Just half a glass, Mr. Honig,” he said, running his hand through his robust thatch of curls and unbuttoning his jacket—a rumpled gray one every bit as formless as the brown jacket he’d worn the day before. His crisp, paisley-patterned tie seemed once again almost dapper by contrast. The detective fidgeted in his chair as if to find a spot of comfort that was by nature beyond his reach.

Pouring a half glass for him and a full glass for myself, I waited for Detective Grayson to disclose the reason for his visit, as clearly, by his growing agitation, he had some business to which he wished to attend.

“We got the coroner’s preliminary report this morning,” he said finally, taking a small sip of lemonade and nodding appreciatively. “It appears your neighbors were dead at least forty-eight hours before you found them. The coroner says they essentially suffocated. Whoever put that tape over their mouths didn’t leave much room for them to breathe.”

I did not want to know this. I did not want to imagine the rising terror that Claire and Hilda must have felt as they watched each other’s chests heave and struggle in vain to fill their lungs with air. I closed my eyes but could not erase the memory of their glassy stares.

“Mr. Honig?”

I opened my eyes to find the detective leaning forward, his narrowed eyes staring directly into mine.

“I know you told me you didn’t see anything suspicious yesterday, but I wonder whether you might have noticed anything out of the ordinary on Friday?”

I thought for a moment about what I had been doing just three days earlier.

“Nothing that I can recall,” I said after some consideration. I explained to the detective that I had observed a week earlier the telltale signs of several large cells being constructed to prepare for the birth of a new queen bee and so my attention had been thus preoccupied.

“This is all very interesting, Mr. Honig . . .”

“Indeed it is,” I agreed. “This wondrous process is begun when a colony’s queen grows old and her egg production begins to lag. Did you know, Detective, that queen bees are no different genetically than any other worker bee?”

Taking his silence as tacit acknowledgment of his ignorance in the ways of bees, I proceeded to lay out for him the process of differentiation that occurs in the hive, a process that begins, as any apiarist knows, once the eggs are laid into the queen cells. I explained how, as soon as the eggs hatch, the nurse bees begin to feed the larvae a specially prepared mixture of regurgitated honey and pollen called royal jelly.

“This royal jelly is what causes certain organs and characteristics to develop in these young bees that transforms each one from an ordinary worker bee into a virgin queen . . .”

“Mr. Honig,” the detective interjected. I paused, waiting for him to speak, but after a moment of silence he simply shook his head, and so I continued without offense, explaining that the transformation of a select worker bee into queen has everything to do with the life cycle of the hive.

“Only the first of these proto-queens to emerge from her cell will live. The others are generally dispatched with a lethal sting by the new regent, who then does the same to her weaker queen mother. Of course in the rare instances when the young queen is unable to perform the requisite matricide, or if she herself proves flawed, the hive workers are quick to surround the doomed queen, who surrenders without a fight to suffocation by the rabble.

“It is the law of the hive that only a queen may sting another queen,” I explained. “And the queen will sting none but her own.”

Having finished the last of his lemonade, the detective began to run his thick forefinger around the rim of his empty glass, producing a high-pitched squeal that was louder, but lower, than that of a newly hatched queen. I pointed out that by whatever means the coup is accomplished, the new virgin queen must next wait for the first sunny day to take wing, where she is quickly followed by a score or so of young drones who pursue her fifty or more feet into the air to mate with her on the fly. The handful of young drones that are successful in their ardor are eviscerated during the mating process. The others are usually cast out of the hive, or killed outright, by the worker bees sometime in early fall, when the drones, having already outlived the only useful purpose for which they were born, are deemed expendable.

“In the beehive, the age-old maxim ‘He who does not work does not eat’ is strictly adhered to.”

“Truly fascinating, Mr. Honig,” the detective said somewhat drily to my ear. Pushing his lemonade glass aside, he extracted his notebook from his suit jacket and laid it open in front of him.

“Now, about last Friday . . .”